Mapping next generation learning spaces as adesignedquality enhancement process
The learning spaces of higher education are changing with collaborative, agile and technology enabled spaces ever more popular.Despite the massive investment required to create these new spaces, current quality systems are poorly placed to account for the value they create. Such learning spacesare typically popular with students but the impact they have on learning outcomes is difficult to capture.Taking a design-research approach, this paper presents a way of assessing the value of learning spaces in context through systematically mapping the expectations reified their designs in terms of both the activity the spaces create and the subsequent learning the activity creates. While presenting a series of specific tools that support this mapping exercise, this paper also contributes to a larger conversation about the sorts of tools and processes the academic community might use to in taking a more active role in accounting forthe quality of our work.
Introduction
This paper reports on an ongoing design-research project investigating the use of design thinking processes for quality enhancement in higher education. Design-research is an approach that seeks to increase the impact and transferability of educational research by engaging in iterative cycles of educational design that is both informed by, and contributes to, theory(Kelly, Baek, & Lesh, 2008; McKenney & Reeves, 2013). This iteration of the project focuses on next generation learning spaces, an area currently attracting massive capital investment in higher education and argues the case for the use of service design thinking in the ‘quality’ processes used to evaluate the use of designed learning spaces.
The paper also mounts a deeper argument for more nuanced accounts of the quality that design processes offer. It is built on the contention that theories of both learning and value are reified in the designed processes of our institutions, including theirquality processes, and that the currently dominant processes embody thin theoretical understandings that do not support a truly educational discussion of quality. As has been noted previously in this journal the ‘quality revolution’ of the last two decades has been a revolution amongst policy makers, one that the academic community has‘reacted to, rather than acted to achieve’ (Saarinen, 2010, p. 56). Accepting this revolution as complete, or at least irreversible, and moving beyond a simple critique of neoliberalism, inertia or compliant indifference (Harvey & Williams, 2010),the objective here is to contribute to a conversation aboutwhat tools and processes the academic community might develop to take back authority and jurisdiction inaccounting for the quality of the work we do.
The argumentispresented in three parts. The first section will introduce the design intent, the theories of learning and the valuespromoted by so-called next generation learning spaces. This is followed by an argument that current quality assurance systems, built largely upon the quantitative proxy measures of neoliberal governance (Allais, 2011; Lingard, 2011) work from narrow theories of mind and so have limited capacity to engage with or account for the complex interaction between learners, learning and learning spaces.The later part of the paper will move to design, presentingexamples of workable service design thinking tools(Strickdorn & Schneider, 2010)that support a utilisation-focussed approach to institutional researchthat makes theories-in-use visible (Patton, 2012; Zepke, Butler, & Leach, 2012). These tools are framed by an adaptation of a logic chain type process (Funnell & Rogers, 2011) calledconjecture mapping(Sandoval, 2014).
Next generation learning spaces
Natural and built environments shape social relations and practices(Braudel, 1995)such that places of learning have a profoundly pedagogical impact on human experience (Gruenewald, 2003). In formal education there is renewed interestin these built environments and as a consequence thelearning spaces of many higher education campuses around the world are changing rapidly (Matthews, Andrews, & Adams, 2011). Like the redbrick and campus visions of higher education that have gone before it, the emergingnext generation of learning spaces respond to changing social understandings of the nature and role of higher education(Pearce, 2001). Notably these spaces speak to an era of a rapidly expanding mass systems of higher educationthat demands a more student-centred learning environment - one that responds to the idea of students as customers - while also seeking to integrate physical and virtual learning spaces(Scottish Funding Council, 2006).
This next generation of learning space design is focussed on group or collaborative teaching/learning spaces. Design features include a move away from a focal point on the teacher by use of large square desks or larger rooms with ‘banquet’ style seating and projection to multiple walls; the use of tiered ‘U-shape’ seating that allows students to see each other and so maximiseteacher and peer interaction; greater provision of electricity and dense Wi-Fi provision to‘bring your own device’ (BYOD); provision of collaborative writing/drawing/design space such as writable walls (effectively very large white boards), and even desks and floors. Capturing many of these features is MIT’s Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) room (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d.)- the same type of space the authors of this paper use in their own centre (removed for review). Additional changes in technology include the installation of cameras to film proceeding that can be streamed externally to the space, or reviewed by participants in replay; the adoption of personal response systems that allow learners to vote on questions posed, or increasingly to interact through social‘backchannels’ such as Twitter. Furniture is mobile, adjustable and stackable allowing spaces to be quicklyrearranged. A diversity of desk shapes are alsonow available enabling and enhancing different types of teacher and peer interaction.
The vision, or reified theory, of learning embodied in spaces following this design is often described in variants of the aphorism ‘guide on the side rather than sage on the stage’. They represent a distinct move from an instructivist to constructivist theory of learning, with students repositioned from reflective absorber of ideas to active participant in the educative process. The emphasis on ‘learning by doing’ is present in there-imagination of other campus spaces beyond the classrooms and lecture theatres in ways that create the campus as social learning spaces. This approach has seen a high priority given to the greater provision of informal or ‘study commons’ spaces on campuses; a significant shift in the ratio of group to private study provision in libraries; use of space for both scheduled classes and student organised collaboration; the merging of social and study spaces including the provision of food and of ‘play’ space within the learning environment precinct(Lom & Sullenger, 2011; Matthews et al., 2011).
Many of the spaces developed in this way have enormous aesthetic appeal. Compared to the industrial boxes they are replacing, the spaces have an organic and engaging feel to them; they are inviting and pleasantplaces to be and they tend to be popular with students. A continuing feature of major reviews of the research on these spaces, however, is theidentification of a near complete lack of empirical evidence about the effects of these spaces on student learning outcomes in higher education(Blackmore, Bateman, Loughlin, O’Mara, & Aranda, 2011; Scottish Funding Council, 2006). A similar gap in the school education setting is beginning to be filled with research such as that from Waldrip, Cox, and Yu (2014) providing an insight into both the challenges and complexities of developing an evidence-based understanding ofnew learning environments. In a longitudinal investigation this study explored the interaction between notions of personalised learning and learning environments in six Australian schools over a three years period. With a focus on personalised learning their study developed an inventory (Personalised Learning Experience Questionnaire - PLEQ) to assess students’ perceptions of their learning environments and then explored the relationships between student’s wellbeing and their academic performance in English and Mathematics. Their research design adopted a Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) approach. SEM is a group of multivariate techniques that include multiple regression, confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, ANOVA and multilevel models that is particularly useful with data that has multiple groups (Ployhart & Oswald, 2004). It is also a very flexible technique that allows researchersto test hypotheses about the relationship between variables and to build theoretical models from non-experimental data.
Waldrip’s team developed a SEM model that found a complex relationship where student well-being was related to both academic performance and the learning environment. However, it was found that the relationship between performance and the learning environment was indirect, working throughwell-being. More flexible and open approaches were found to be particular beneficial for older students. The findings also point to an indirect relationshipthat active learning directly increases student performance in STEM subjects (Freeman et al., 2014). The model shown in Figure 1 demonstrates the complexity of the system and provides an indication of how difficult measuring the impacts of different spaces on learning quality in any educational setting may be.
[Figure 1 near here]
An expansive theory of learning
Current directions in the development of learning spaces are entangled with very strong assumptions about the nature of learning and the value that higher education campuses offer in the current era of online and mass higher education. Embedded in these designs of space is a broadly constructivist theory of learning – the idea that learning best occurs through largely dialogical interaction with both teachers and students and involves students being active participants in generating the learning experience. While consistently present in campus design trends, however, theories of active learning seem to be typically understood by designers of the spaces, and perhaps by many teaching in them, in highly philosophical terms and with little capacity to respond to the nuances of each educational setting (Blackmore et al., 2011).Emerging over the last two decades, the learning sciences and related areas in cognitive research are beginning to provide the science and the detail required to fill this gap(Sawyer, 2006). A majorcontention of this paper is that to address both the lack of empirical research, and the subsequent lack of appropriate quality assurance processes in regards to learning spaces, a much stronger understanding of the intent and objectives of these designs is required - one that goes beyond a vague philosophical position that a ‘guide on the side’ trumps a ‘stage on the stage’. While this aphorism is in keeping with a contemporary post-modern distrust of the expert (Schudson, 2006), there arealso well developed and well evidenced theories on active learning availablefrom the cognitive domain that can be drawn upon for design work and judgements of quality.
One example of a strong theoretical foundation for active learning is the conception of education and learning as an expansive activity in the sense used in socio–historicalactivity theory (Engeström, 2001; Murphy & Rodriguez-Manzanares, 2008). Understood as an expansive activity, learning is about acquiring the tools of the learner’s socio-cultural context and ‘growing into the intellectual life of those around them’(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 88). The use of thesetools however, only makes sense when used for activity - the interaction between the learner and their context, including other learners. This approach does not see learning as an isolated product or performance but rather is the integration of concept, learners, and their community(Engeström, 2006). Lave and Wenger’s concept of situated cognition and the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) builds on a similar conceptual base. This approach views learning as engaging in problem solving in the course of ongoing everyday activities. It emphasises the need for those who would foster learning to cultivate both community and networks (Wenger, Trayner, & Laat, 2011, p. 12).
The idea of learning as an expansive activity is receiving strong support in recent neuro-cognitive research where researchers such as Hutchins (2010) have argued that human cognition is best understood as part of a brain-body-world system, and that the cognitive processes involved in doing work, becoming expert, and in evolving work practices are in fact the same cognitive processes. While this research has been applied to education in some domains (see for example Roth & Hsu, 2014), the most popular theory-of-mind in use in higher education remains one in which the role of the body ends once it has delivered the brain to the classroom (Claxton, 2012; Roth & Jornet, 2013).
From an expansive understanding of education, built on empirical research into human learning, it is possible to develop a design brief for learning spaces that goes beyond a general desire to give greater democratic affordance to student participation. We can suggest, for example, that effective learning spaces will facilitate engagement in the mind-body-world systems of the context and the learning domain. That is, students using the spaces will move beyond engaging with each other and will collaboratively develop and shape tools and solutions to problems in their context and learning domain. Their connections will not simply be with each other and their instructors, but with the broader knowledge, professional and social systems relevant to their learning.The benefit of bringing more developed theory to a consideration of learning spaces and their quality is that it begins to provide a clearer understanding of the value proposition of new learning space and, hence, an alignment between purpose and quality evaluation. Theory shows us, for example, that new spaces may support the development of qualitatively new or different ways of thinking.
Campbell’s Law and the limitations of QA in the learning context
Current approaches to quality assurance (QA) are also entangled with very strong but very different assumptions about the nature of learning. Dominant QA models can be seen to have their roots in the development of off-the-shelf quantitative analysis software that created a capacity to measure social and business phenomena that simply did not exist before (Power, 1994). The emphasis on numbers has become a major trend in global education policy and public policy broadly (Lingard, 2011; Lingard & Sellar, 2013), bringing with it many assumptions from the discipline of economics (Allais, 2011). While increased audit capacity has changed the world, scholars noted very early the limitations of this change to social governancenicely captured by Campbell who argued:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor (Campbell, 1976, p. 49).
As in many other domains of social activitythe use of simple quantitative indicators in quality assurance has become standard in higher education despite their potential to distort and corrupt being evident through no more than simple thought experiment. For example, a common measure in higher educationis student completion. The basic assumption in choosing this indicator is that student completion correlates with higher quality teaching and thatissues of qualitylie principally with the teacher and institution rather than with what the student actually does.With only a little further thought, the potential for institutions to take actions that are actually counter to students engaging in quality work is evident. When completion rates are valorised or even incentivised, for example, it is evident thatthere is a strong structural incentive created for institutions to reduce academic standards even in the face of moderation and peer-review strategies.
Beyond thought experiment, there is clear evidence of this sort of perverse effect taking place on grand scales in other educational settings. In Australia, for example, Lingard and Sellar (2013), have shown the way that some state governments (Australia has a federal system of government) have systematically ‘gamed’ the national system of literacy and numeracy testing in order to protect their reputational capital over and above making real improvements to the quality of learning. Similarly, in higher education, staff are being set performance measures derived from proxy quality measures rather than from learning theory (Miller & Seldin, 2014), with research showing that even statistically insignificant variation in those measures (Alderman, Towers, & Bannah, 2012) have an impact on academic careers (Boysen, Kelly, Raesly, & Casner, 2014).Consistent with Campbell’s prediction, there is even evidence is this setting of a negative correlation between the common quality measure of student satisfaction as reported in anonymous survey, and student performance in subsequent years of study (Carrell & West, 2010).
It is evident, when examined closely, that many of the measures being used in quality assurance systems are chosen because they are easy to measure rather than that they measure the most significant things educationally (Coates, 2007; Shum & Ferguson, 2011). In doing so, they reify theories of learning that are often in stark contrast to those being used by the professionals charged with designing education in the form of curriculum, resources or, indeed, spaces. Developed from a neoliberal ontology(Allais, 2011), many common measures assume that quality in education is about the services that teachers and institutions provide to students rather than, say, an evaluation of the learning potential of the activities students engage in within the institutions(Kashif & Basharat, 2014; Zepke et al., 2012). It is no surprise then to see that a common quality measure like student feedback improves when learning designs are highly individualised and provide student with just-in-time support (Scott, Shah, Grebennikov, & Singh, 2008), even when learning designs are framed around learning outcomes such as collaboration, autonomous learning and social/professional engagement.